Collections Management

Your first step should be to determine what it is that you want to collect. Asking yourself what the purpose of your collection is will help you decide what you should be collecting. All material in your archive should support this purpose; is it to preserve the activities of your organisation, is it to preserve the history of your local area?

What is archival material? It is important to keep in mind that archives are collections of original material, often referred to as records. While a case can be made for keeping copies of some material held elsewhere this should be kept to a minimum and you should consider keeping this in a complementary reference section.

To make sure your collection is a focussed and useful resource and provides evidence of your organisation’s activities and interests it is important to develop a collection policy (click here to download a template) that details what you will collect. This policy can be as broad or as detailed as you wish but it should clearly define the purpose of your collection.

It is also helpful to decide what sort of records you will not collect, for example – material that would be better held elsewhere, material that you cannot store, preserve or provide access to, material that does not align with your collection policy, material that you already have examples of.

Your policy document is your go-to document for supporting your collection decisions.

If you already have existing collections your collection policy can support appraisal decisions, that is deciding what to preserve long term. Appraisal is one of the most important tasks that an archivist undertakes as what remains in the archive is what contributes to our collective memory. Remember, however, that there is a cost involved in preserving material long term and you want to make sure you are keeping only the best and most useful material. Once you have a collection policy it is a useful exercise to go through any existing material you hold and make sure it aligns with your policy.

For each item in your collection ask yourself or your group the following questions:

• Why are we preserving this?
• What are the long-term benefits of preserving this and do these outweigh the cost of long-term preservation?
• Who are we preserving this material for?

In some cases, it can be enough to keep a small sample of the material rather than in its entirety. If you have a bundle of similar items (this can be common with photographs for example) keep the one that is in the best condition, also look out for annotations that make an item unique or more interesting. Duplicates can be useful however so don’t necessarily throw them out – you can keep them in a regular box for outreach purposes.

Accessioning is the process of bringing material into your collection. You should keep an accession register (click here to download a template) of items you have acquired. This should record the date of acquisition, where/who the material has come from, brief description, assigned located, any terms of deposit, name of person you received the material. You can keep this electronically, for example in an excel spreadsheet, or in a physical notebook.

Give each accession a number – year/no. e.g., 2023/1 You do not need to split an accession of multiple items into separate accessions in fact keeping a deposit together as one accession helps to preserve its original order, provenance and related terms of deposit.

De-accessioning. Strictly speaking you should not be accessioning anything that you do not intend to keep, however if you decide not to keep material that has been accessioned, or you have un-accessioned material that does not fit with your collection policy, in the interests of transparency you must record on your accession register what you decide to do with it e.g. returned to depositor, transferred to another repository, destroyed.

If you have material lying around that has not been accessioned, add it to your accession register now with as much detail as you can.

The accession register is an important document for several reasons: As well as being a record of what you have collected and from where, it provides you with a list of the material you hold in the absence of a comprehensive catalogue.

Another important document is the deposit agreement (click here to download a template) between you and a depositor which outlines the terms of the deposit. You can have a standard one drafted which can be amended to include any specific requests. An agreement should be created for each separate deposit. Add the relevant accession number to the agreement and keep somewhere safe.

NB If a depositor wishes to impose restrictions on the material, for example, stipulating that it cannot be accessed without prior permission or they want it to be closed for a long period of time, you must consider whether it is worth your while to accept it.

You might be planning to add material to your archive that will be created by you or your organisation as part of your activities, for example minutes, reports, photographs, etc. When creating your material it is important to consider the following:

• Record the date on the record.
• Make sure the information you include is useful and accurately records your activities.
• Avoid using perishable materials or items that will damage your documents over time e.g., staples, sellotape, post-it notes etc.
• When creating digital material use the recognised preservation format where possible for example TIFF for photographs and WAV for audio.

Your collection should be stored in a secure, clean, dry and environmentally monitored space. Make sure there are working smoke detectors and do not use heaters or gas stoves. You may also wish to include a space to allow visitors to access archival material, but this must be under supervision and do not allow food or drink near original archive items. See Collections Care for more detailed information on how to store archival collections and Sharing Your Collection for on-site access recommendations..

Once you have a collection, or if you already have a considerable amount of material for your archive, create a simple boxlist (click here to download an example). The best way to do this is using Excel but you can just as easily create one with paper and pencil. Give each box (or folder/drawer/bag) a number and note the contents and covering dates if known. Also note any relevant storage or condition information i.e., does it need outsize storage, does it need photographic storage, is it fragile? This information will be useful when planning what storage and preservation materials to purchase. You can list several boxes together if they contain similar material, see the example below.

Dramatic Society Archive – Boxlist
Box/File No.	Title	Contents	Extent	Dates	Notes
1-3	Performances	Posters, photos and programmes relating to individual productions	3 boxes	1970-1990	2 outsize (A3) posters
4-5	Committee Papers	Minutes and Agendas	1 box; 1 folder	1980-1990

It can also be a good idea to colour code your boxlist so that when you come to create a catalogue of your collection (see Cataloguing) you can easily group similar material together. For example, highlight administrative records in one colour and promotional records in another or colour code by activity/theme.

You can add the location of each box into your boxlist or maintain a separate location database.